


Our Little Lives Don't Count at All

by failsafe



Category: Young Avengers
Genre: Alternate Reality, Ambiguity, Angst, Bittersweet, F/M, Marriage, Marvel 11051, Pillow Talk, Pregnancy, Present Tense, Romance, TommyKate Week 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-20
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 21:56:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/728329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate and Tom's pillow talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Little Lives Don't Count at All

**Author's Note:**

> I am sorry that I stole Les Mis lyric for the title and I have only heard the song twice. The phrase just got very stuck in my head and inspired this fic. This fic is from TommyKate Week on the tumblr community fuckyeahtommykate. It is for the Day 1 (two days late) prompt 'Earth 11051.' 
> 
> This fic may be read as very sad or it may simply be read as bittersweet. The ambiguity is deliberate and I will explain a bit more what I mean in end notes. Just don't say that I didn't warn you that this might be very sad.

“Do you think this was inevitable?”

“What are you talking about?”

The room has a blue glow that emanates from unlikely surfaces. Even with the overhead lights turned off, monitors and sensors beep from time to time. The compartment hums in a high-pitched register, hardly audible to human ears, like a neglected television set. Kate has the constant, uneasy feeling of being watched.

She turns, mindful not to try and roll flat onto her gradually swelling belly, dragging her fingertip along the panel that dials up the lights. As she rolls back into place, lying on her back, Tom squints. It is almost entirely for her benefit—she knows that his eyes can adjust faster than she could ever hope to turn around. Especially in her _condition_. She can feel the weight of her children now, though she still has a long way to go.

“Do you think we always ended up like this?” she repeats. “In the end.”

“On a Kree spaceship about five hundred years after we were born?”

Kate turns onto her side to face him, the exact amount of space between them matching the room she needs to simply allow her stomach to barely brush his still-firm, flat abs. They have been together long enough for their bodies to anticipate one another. She's sighing audibly, huffing, irritated—Tom is smart enough to evade her question, to make fun of it. He knows better.

Tom stares at her. He blinks green eyes at her and she notices the blue-dark beneath them, amplified by the annoyingly cheery blue tint to the air aboard many spaceships.

“Together,” she says simply, because the word carries so much weight. Years. Just time. Tommy and his running, Kate and her hiding, and their falling together—magnets drawn from opposite poles, and she wonders if she would have thought that way when she was sixteen.

“So you're stayin' with me?” Tom asks. The edges of his smile are practiced and just a little worn but as dangerous as ever.

“I'm having your kids.”

“I knocked you up.”

“Tom—“

“—I'm just saying—“ he says, and he's toying with her hair.

“I'm your wife.”

“I know.”

“We're... together.”

And they weren't together just because of sex or marriage or babies. They were, they are together because they're _all_ together. It's all they have, all they know, all they trust. They no longer have a home, any root in space or time. They have a team and a fight and a mission, even if it isn't exactly the way they had made Nathaniel Richards picture it. He was, is, just a child, only months older than when she first met him. She still remembers one of the only real conversations she had with him. She had encouraged him to consider how much worse things might be if he didn't give in to his fate.

She hates that. She still hates that—the concept of such hopeless inevitability, but she tries to comfort herself with the idea that it is still a choice. And it's in Nate's hands to make the right one. In the meantime, all they can do is wait. And live. Keep living. Stay alive because that's what they've been doing for such a long time.

“I know you want me to answer,” Tom admits, and she can see it in him that he's tired and that he wants to go back to sleep, but she watches his eyes and nods, listening, “... but I'm not sure what you're asking. We're here. We're alive. We're... going to have twin babies. That's as together as we can be, sweetheart.”

Kate stays on her side, facing him and sharing his body heat in the sterile cool of the spaceship, but her gaze drifts briefly up toward the ceiling of the compartment and grows a little distant.

“I just wonder if we've done the right thing.”

“I trust him.”

“What?”

“I trust Billy, and I say... let him deal with that stuff. We've got kids to worry about. And kids shouldn't have their parents worrying about other shit more than them.”

“I just... wonder, if Iron Lad goes back. If he _changes_ everything. What happens to us?”

“We're here. He already went back. I don't know. You're making my head hurt,” Tom complains, but in the same breath he irritably nuzzles toward her, the cool to the touch tip of his nose brushing against her throat, breath falling against her neck.

“I just wanna know, when you start messing with time when it all changes,” Kate replies, lowering her gaze as she feels Tom—Tommy—so close and alive, present, breathing, father of her children. Her hand trails down and she touches the soft curve of her stomach as she feels the flutter of movement. Her babies, awake or turning in their sleep. She shuts her eyes then, briefly very afraid but she hides it in a sharp breath.

“Hey,” Tom hushes her because he knows her too well for her to hide. “What's the matter?” he asks, and he waits. When she is still, he tries to draw her from her stillness with his lips to her neck.

Kate reaches behind her back and fishes, blindly, until she finds the light panel and dims it back down to as near darkness as they can get.

“Hey, does this mean I'm getting lucky tonight?” Tommy asks, and she honestly can't tell if he's teasing or hopeful. Probably both. And she's tempted. She considers.

“I'm not so pregnant I can only have sex with the lights out,” she indulges him for a moment, playful and dry.

But there's a weight in her stomach—not in her womb which is warm and safe for her children, hiding them for a while longer—and she can't quite shake it, so she can't make up her mind. She sighs heavily—discontent. She turns over slowly, regretting the loss of Tom's face to her neck, but she slides down the bed a bit too until she can let her head tuck beneath his chin instead, reaching up behind her as she had for the light but instead finding his warm fingers. She tugs them and draws his arm over her and he readily complies. She wonders if he thinks this is with intent and she wonders the same about herself, but then she hears the puppy whine at the back of her ear. He has resigned himself but never silently.

“I just... don't know what I'd do if—what if we make them not happen?” she asks, and there's no need to specify who she's talking about, though she thinks idly of Eli's little boy, and the thousand other good things they've still managed to do, despite the things that if she let them would cover her in guilt.

“ _We_ won't,” Tom says, and she finally trusts that they're on the same page. It's just that he doesn't think, doesn't fear as she does that somehow she'll be breathing him one moment, falling asleep in his arms in the dark, pregnant and for the moment safe, and then she'll open her eyes, only—she won't anymore. And instead there's another girl who never looked for a second time at Tommy Shepherd. There's another girl whose tears he never tasted without any hint of _expectation_. There's no woman finally ready to give life beyond her own. There's suddenly a world that _replaces_ this one where none of _those things_ , none of _their_ things happen, even in a time when there is no longer the weight of the fear they now live with, even now, every day. There's a girl and there's a boy, and they aren't together. Not anymore and maybe not ever.

And it's such a little fear. Such a strange, small, selfish fear. But Kate can't stop it. She won't try because, when her fingers find Tom's again and entwine, as they move she can feel herself breathe. And it feels like life itself is moving, changing, shifting. And then she starts to feel heavy, sleepy calm again as Tommy kisses and finally slows and breathes into her hair, slower than he ever does anything. And it's soft and quiet, then it moves and there's a sound she realizes is her own, drowsy laughter as she presses Tom's hand to her belly and asks...

Life moving.

“Do you feel it?” 

**Author's Note:**

> When I read the appropriate issue (and reread it before writing) I was sort of conflicted about how I viewed how exactly the status of this as an alternate timeline worked--if it would coexist alongside the new timeline created a la one of Marvel's many coexisting universe or if it must be erased in order for the present YA canon timeline to exist (a la Donna Noble in the _Turn Left_ episode of Doctor Who, if that helps.) 
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated and I am sorry once again if I hurt your heart a bit. You were not along. I made myself sad and worried while I was writing this. I would especially be interested to know which of the two options you as the reader got hold of and which read the most strongly from the piece, since I as the author cannot see it as you do. 
> 
> I am sorry this was so angsty (to whatever degree it was), given that this is for a ship celebration week. I am told I hate happiness.


End file.
